


go raise your robes, go have your trial (i'll let you win)

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Series: from our invincible heights [2]
Category: Kingsman (Movies), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 18:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14775189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: “Well,” and this time there’s nothing familiar about the twist of his uncle’s mouth. “There’s a good deal we need to catch up on, if you’re to come with me to Avalon.”Avalon. Suddenly everything makes sense, every question he’s never thought to ask - why Ben looks like a banker but carries himself like a warrior. How he speaks at least five languages comfortably, picks locks like a professional thief, and drives like a bat out of hell. Why they’re out here, in the desert, under a borrowed name.Why Luke is an orphan.He knows of Avalon, but he hasn’t learned it in school. He’s heard it from whispers in town, furtive glances around the mosque, hushed tones in the market. Avalon, the people are saying. The seat of the Rebellion.“Avalon?” he asks again, because he can’t quite believe it. People like his uncle - or rather, people like who he thought his uncle was - don’t go to Avalon.Ben grins, wide and a little bit wild. “Avalon.”





	go raise your robes, go have your trial (i'll let you win)

Luke is three years old when he asks the woman who is raising him what he is supposed to call her. “Mama?” he tries, because all of his friends have women who live in their houses like this, who make their food and kiss their foreheads and sing them to sleep, and all of them are called Mama. All he knows is that his is called Shmi, and that is her name and not what she is, and he’s not supposed to call grown-ups by their name like that (unless it’s Uncle Owen or Uncle Ben).

She smiles at him, sadly, and kisses him on the forehead like she always does: once. Twice. “I am not your mother, my Luke,” and before he can bring himself to worry over this fact, to worry who she might be and where the mother he might supposed to have is, she takes his hand gently. “I am your grandmother.”

“ _Jidda_ ,” he smiles. He knows this word: it means his mama’s mama.

Luke is three years old when he learns that having a grandmother is just as good.

* * *

Luke is seven years old when he asks his grandmother where his parents went, and whether they are ever coming home. “It was The Massacre,” she tells him slowly, sadly, and she doesn’t need to say much more - they learn about The Massacre in school, the first generation too young to remember it firsthand, to explain away why so many in the world are like his family: filled with sadness, and missing their parents.

“They died?” He already knows the answer. If they were alive, they would have come home by now.

“I lost my husband and our son Edern to The Massacre,” her voice is wet with the tears he has never seen her shed, “and your father trying to stop it. The Black Knight killed him.”

Luke knows all about the Black Knight, too. They learn about him when they learn about the Emperor, and how the world chose him to be the leader and to take care of them, but he only cared about part of the world (and that part wasn’t  _their_ part). He thinks maybe he’s not supposed to know that second bit, but he  _listens_. “And Mama?”

She kisses his forehead like she always does - twice. “I didn’t even know she was gone until Ben brought you to me,” and she holds him tightly, too tight, like she might lose him too.

Luke is seven years old when he learns that he is an orphan.

* * *

Luke is fifteen years old when his grandmother dies, losing herself to cancer and to the grief that she’s always worn like a second skin; she carries the sorrow of her sixty-one years carved into the deep fissures of her cheeks, the lackluster grey of her hair, the frailness of her bones like a wounded bird. Luke is fifteen years old when his grandmother dies, but he thinks she’s been dying his entire life.

It is peaceful, her passing, in a way her life hasn’t been. She’s at home, and her boys are there with her - Luke is allowed to sit on the bed beside her by virtue of being her favorite, holding her shaking, fragile hand in his own while Owen and Ben perch at odds at opposite ends of the room. Shmi tugs him close and gives him a hug, and kisses him twice on the forehead as she has always done (”One for you,” she tells him every single time, and then swoops in for a second, “and one for later.”), and then she is simply  _gone_.

His uncles wait only until her fingers have slid from Luke’s grip before they begin arguing.

“The boy stays here,” Owen growls; he’s a good seven inches shorter than Ben and just as much as broad; he plants his feet wide and sturdy, between Ben and the bed, and crosses his arms like a statement of fact.

Ben does not take the bait. “Luke is old enough to make his own decisions,” he says quietly. He’s always been the quiet one, quiet in the way his grandmother was, like there’s too much grief in him to leave room for anything else - quiet like a funeral. “And, to be perfectly honest, you don’t have any legal claim to him.”

Owen bristles like a bear, crossing the empty space between them to put himself against Ben’s chest. “Neither do you,” he snarls the reminder, but catches himself on the sadness that permeates the room; he and Ben have never agreed on anything but Luke, and they both turn to him now.

He is not, he insists to himself, crying - he is much,  _much_  too old to cry. He is, perhaps, breathing a little wetly though, and he doesn’t complain when Ben pulls him into a tight hug.

“Take him for a few days,” Owen concedes, allowing himself the moment of sadness over losing the woman who was his mother for twenty years now. He drops a heavy hand on Luke’s shoulder and squeezes, thumb rubbing a circle against the back of his neck, and uses the other to wipe his eyes. “Just while I take care of everything here.”

* * *

“What happens to me now?” Luke asks around a mouthful of tajine; he’s fifteen but his youth still sticks around the roundness of his face, hair the color of sand with eyes the color of spring, and for not the first time Obi-Wan thinks he looks entirely too much like his father. 

“What would you like to happen?”

Luke considers the question, which Obi-Wan had asked in English - he’d only begun learning the language recently, usually at home with his uncle and grandmother guiding him through the unfamiliar sounds, despite other schools offering it as early as age ten. “I would very much like to not stay with Uncle Owen,” he hides the admission behind another bite, as though ashamed to say anything disparaging about a family member. “He never lets me do anything fun.”

The second part is added with a shy smile and a twinkle in his eye, as if to remind Obi-Wan that despite only seeing him twice a year he lets him have entirely  _too much_  fun; in addition to English, he’d taught Luke to steal a car and ride a motorcycle and fire a gun and build a computer, all in the name of not being able to say no to anything his nephew asked. “It’s not always about what’s  _fun_ ,” but there’s no sting to the words, no rebuke. “Owen is a good man, and he offers a stability that I don’t have.”

“I don’t want stability,” Luke whines (Still a child. Still his father’s son.). “I want to go places. See the world. I feel like there’s something I’m missing, something I’m missing  _out on_ , and I don’t know what it is.” Luke has big eyes, big as the future he sees ahead of him, and if there were ever a doubt that he was a Skywalker as much as a Naberrie this would be the moment to dispel it. “Just that I won’t find it here.”

Obi-Wan contemplates his answer very carefully - he learned all too hard a lesson about how his words could backfire against him. “You weren’t born here in Sfax, you know. You weren’t born in Tunisia at all,” he begins calmly, like he hasn’t just shattered Luke’s entire world view. “You were born in Canada, in the province of Quebec, and I believe that makes you a Canadian citizen.”

He gapes like a fish. “What…. what?”

“A Canadian citizen,” Obi-Wan continues, finally starting in on his brik and mechouia. “Should be fairly easy to secure you a passport and travel papers, if you want to come back with me.”

_Back_.

His entire life, Luke has heard stories of Uncle Ben’s home in the mountains, the cluster of square houses painted in primary colors standing out like blocks against the otherwise grey of the background - grey rocks, grey skies, grey lake. Isolated from the world, a plane and a train and a car and a hike away, and sometimes the mist comes across the snow like a dancing spirit.  _Annwn_ , the town is called.  _The Other World_.

He wants.

“I can’t go to Annwn with you! Jidda’s only been gone two days, and I have school, and-”

And.

_What happens to me now?_ , he asked. He never expected this to be the answer.

“I can’t leave,” he says again, but there’s a smile in his voice. Hope, and excitement. “Without saying goodbye to her.”

* * *

His grandmother’s grave is an unmarked rock at the very edge of the cemetery, hidden away by brush and weeds; they’d known from the moment her health turned from bad to worse that she would never have the funeral she deserved. Too much noise and notice - it wasn’t any less dangerous to be a Lars then it was a Naberrie or a Skywalker, but it was slightly less distinct. Instead she was quietly interned in the dead of night with no one but her boys to witness.

“Luke!”

The voice belongs to Mrs. Whitesun, a neighbor of theirs from down the way. Her daughter, Beru, has been dating Owen on and off since high school, and she’s always been the closest thing his grandmother had to a friend. Normally, he would gladly stop to chat with her a bit. But here, in the graveyard, it can only mean one thing.

“You poor boy,” she speaks to him as though he’s far younger than he is, and pulls him into a tight hug that smells strongly of the fish her family sells. “Beru told me the news.” Beside him, Ben’s body goes stiff; he’s always carried himself more like a soldier than any private citizen, now readied for a fight that Luke can’t yet see coming. “I hope you don’t mind, but I arranged a small service for her. She was so much a part of our community, there are so many who will miss her.” Another squeeze, and then she lets him go. “Beru set up a Facebook group,” and this time the pressure is Ben’s at his elbow, tugging him back toward the car. “I’ll have her send you the information.”

Facebook, which he has only under a name that is not his own, and only within the last few months. The same for email, or internet in general. Luke was never told that his family was living on the run, but he inferred as much - there are very few photos of him taken, and only developed at home. No mention of him, or any of his family, in newspapers. They get their mail through a P.O. Box registered in the name of the man they purchased their home from, and even his government-issued documents have him as Larsson rather than any of the three family names he has otherwise available to him.

Luke was never expressly told that it was unsafe for him to be found, but his father died trying to change the world and he’s always assumed that  _meant something_.

When Ben tugs his elbow again, more urgently, he follows.

* * *

The fire has burnt out by the time they arrive, but the smoke is still warm.

The house an unrecognizable husk of char and ruin, as are the two bodies barely outside it.

Luke vomits. Ben throws the keys to the Jeep, and begins down the street on foot.

* * *

Later, minutes or hours (Luke isn’t sure if he’s lost time or if he’s just in shock. He never much liked his uncle, but he did love him), Ben presses a bottle of water into his shaking hands and pulls him into a comforting hug. “From now on,” he whispers the words fiercely against Luke’s hair, “we are completely off the grid. No papers, no cell phones. Ben Lars and Luke Larsson are dead. We don’t exist.”

“What’s happening?”

The man who meets his eye is both his favorite uncle and a stranger, hard in his eyes and soft in the lines around them, and Luke thinks maybe that’s an answer enough. “You’ve learned of The Massacre in school,” Ben’s voice is sharp, all clipped edges and punctuated letters like it isn’t when he speaks at home; there’s a certain carelessness in the way he speaks any language but English, like maybe there’s an entire culture he’s running from. “And the Emperor, and the Black Knight. But what, I wonder, have you learned of the Kingsmen?”

Luke blinks. Answers that bring more questions. “The… the who?”

“Well,” and this time there’s nothing familiar about the twist of his uncle’s mouth. “There’s a good deal we need to catch up on, if you’re to come with me to Avalon.”

_Avalon_. Suddenly everything makes sense, every question he’s never thought to ask - why Ben looks like a banker but carries himself like a warrior. How he speaks at least five languages comfortably, picks locks like a professional thief, and drives like a bat out of hell. Why they’re out here, in the desert, under a borrowed name.

Why Luke is an orphan.

He knows of Avalon, but he hasn’t learned it in school. He’s heard it from whispers in town, furtive glances around the mosque, hushed tones in the market.  _Avalon_ , the people are saying. The seat of the Rebellion.

“Avalon?” he asks again, because he can’t quite believe it. People like his uncle - or rather, people like who he thought his uncle was - don’t go to Avalon.

Ben grins, wide and a little bit wild. “Avalon.”

* * *

Ben takes him to a bar in Tripoli, the sort of place that his grandmother would have wrung both their necks for even thinking of entering, and walks in with the ease of familiarity that scares Luke, because he’s never looked this comfortable anywhere else. Drinks are ordered - a beer for both of them (the bartender offers a gruff “he eighteen?” at Luke, and despite the fact that he looks closer to fourteen than almost sixteen Ben says “of course” and the bartender just  _believes him_ ), but it’s not until they’re halfway through that Ben leads them away from the bar to a table in the corner.

“Good afternoon,” he greets the young man slouched into the farthest chair; he slumps like he’s looking to not be seen and dresses like he’s looking to not be spoken to, and he looks up from beneath a mop of chestnut hair with indignation at both occurring. There’s a blink or two as he takes in Ben, pressed suit and hair that’s now far more grey than red, glasses and pocket square tucked away, and decides whether or not he’s a threat. He apparently, incorrectly, decides that he is not. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”

The young man rearranges his slouch across the chair to put him a few inches farther away. “Whatever you’re looking to buy, old man, I’m not selling.” Luke’s never met an American before, but he recognizes the accent.

“I’m not buying,” Ben grins that wild, dangerous grin again. “You’re offering.”

In the darker corner at the man’s side, a large shape resolves itself into an even larger man, the largest Luke’s ever seen - coarse hair curls from his head and his chin, nearly down to his elbows, and there’s a snarl frozen around his mouth. At a single gesture from his friend, he sits back in his chair and continues to glare at them, muttering quiet, unintelligble threats beneath his breath. “I’m  _offering_? What, exactly, am I offering?”

“Passage for myself and the boy, to wherever we need to go. No papers, no questions asked.”

The large man barks a laugh as coarse as the rest of him, and his friend surrenders any attempt at disinterest to lean forward on his elbows, eyes intent. “I don’t know who you think you are—”

“Call me Galahad,” Ben squeezes a hand against Luke’s knee beneath the table, pressing down whatever reaction he might have to the unfamiliar title, and smothers a pleased smile when Luke focuses on the glass in front of him rather than the conversation.

It’s like some password has been entered, unlocking a secret world - the man suddenly straightens his spine like he might start saluting, and the giant beside him falls into a subdued silence. “Shit,” he begins, and runs a hand back through his hair in an attempt to comb it; it leaves it stuck up in the front with something that looks suspiciously like motor oil. “Fuck, okay. Yeah, I got it.” The eyes narrow suddenly. “Wait, this wasn’t the deal—”

Ben shrugs with one shoulder, a careless gesture with his glass. “I hardly care about the arrangement you have with my associates, Mr. Solo.”

He bristles, but knowledge of an identity for the man sitting across from him has him now oddly compliant. “The only reason you guys even  _have_  Jabba on your radar is because of me. Kay said that got me immunity.”

“I’m not here about the drugs you’ve been running,” he clarifies, too loud for the crowded bar, “or the information you’ve been trading.” A few heads turn at that, and the man - Solo - tries to slide further into the shadows, already recognized. “I’m here because despite all of that, you obviously have some form of moral code. You never once participated in his trafficking, despite the money he offered, and instead sought out prosecution.”

It’s not just the larger man who growls at this; Solo loses his fear into absolute fury, the slouch of his body turning angled and sharp as he leans forward suddenly, whip quick, like a snake. “People can’t be bought and sold,” he snarls, “and I can’t either.”

Another shrug. “And as I’ve already said,” Ben finishes his drink, “I’m not paying.”

Solo shares a glance with his companion, who has yet to speak, but apparently passes as an entire conversation - stances shift, and by the end of it the large man looks ready for a fight just as Solo looks ready to go quietly. “What’s your name, mijo?” He’s staring at Luke now, voice soft.

“Luke,” he answers warily, but Ben seems relaxed at his side, like maybe this is part of his plan.

“Alright Luke,” he still speaks gently, with none of the bravado from earlier; it makes him seem younger. The change from only moments before is startling. “You got a last name?”

“Not anymore.” Soft eyes turn to Ben, suddenly hard edges, and all too slowly Luke realizes exactly what sort of smuggling had turned Solo to state’s evidence. “It’s not like that! Look, Solo—”

“Han.”

“Han, I’m not being kidnapped or anything. Ben is my uncle, he’s… he’s the only family I have left. They killed the rest, and we need to get out of the country.”

Han shares another completely silent conference with the man at his side, a mixture of hand and facial gestures, before they both finish their drinks and shuffle into their coats. “Alright. No questions, no papers. We get you where you need to go, and then Kingsman is  _done_  with me, got it?”

Ben, and Luke, after a pointed stare, follow his lead. “That sounds agreeable.”

* * *

Han’s boat looks like a decrepit old fishing trawler, but has state of the art navigation and communication systems - smuggling, it seems, pays rather well. It’s the work of a few minutes to get them out to sea, and then an argument of an hour or so when Ben tells him where they’re headed. “I hope you realize that Chittagong is almost a month out,” Han doesn’t seem to mind. The farther they get from Africa, the more cheerful he gets.

It’s four days in before Chewie does anything more than grunt at Luke, and ten days before he gets his full story - someone had tried to slit his throat during the Massacre, which hadn’t killed him but had damaged his vocal chords beyond repair. He can’t speak above a whisper, and even then it’s painful and slow, but he understands at least three languages fluently; Luke watches Han chatter away at his friend in casual, easy Spanish when they’re alone at the helm, and a few quiet exchanges that Chewie actually speaks for in what Han explains is Maori.

Ben doesn’t speak much at all, until they’re two days out from Libya and he tells them he needs to make a call.

The call involves a series of passcodes and firewalls, almost forty-eight minutes to set up, and Luke thought he knew how computers worked but by the time there’s finally a video call pulled up on the screen he’s entirely lost. “Incoming transmission,” Ben speaks into the mic, “Authorization Alpha-One-Two-Thorn-Underscore-One-Two-Five-Seven-Gilch.”

A man’s face fills the screen. He’s about the same age as Ben, but his hair has kept it’s previous dark shades instead of turning to silver like Ben’s has over the past years, and when he smiles there are deep crinkles around his dark eyes. “Good morning, Arthur,” he greets warmly, almost mischievously - it’s nearly midnight, which means he’s either got a rather exacting sense of humor or he’s in a different timezone, and Luke still doesn’t quite know what’s going on except that Ben is also Galahad is also Arthur and apparently knows quite a few people all across the globe.

Ben pulls a face. “Don’t call me that.”

“And why not?” Though not laughing outwardly, there’s evidence of it in his voice. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

Any amusement there could have been dies at the blankness of Ben’s voice. “That name doesn’t carry the same honor it once did,” and on the screen the man’s face wavers as well.

“So you’re coming in,” he changes the topic, and the tone, entirely. “And it’s not even Christmas. Tell me, my friend, to what do we owe the pleasure?”

“No pleasure, I’m afraid. We’ve been compromised.” In short sentences, half of which don’t even make sense to Luke (it’s not even that he’s still learning the language they speak - English, it’s been English since his uncle’s death - but more that half of the words they use are so out of context that there’s no hope of him keeping up. He recognizes ‘desert’ and ‘precautions’ but falters at phrases like ‘more dread’ used as casually as someone’s name), he explains what’s happened over the past week. His friend - Percival, he’d finally been called - grows more and more concerned as the story draws to a close.

“You can’t bring Luke here,” Percival says, and Luke’s eyes snap back to the screen at hearing his name; other than the bar it hasn’t been given, or used, since his uncle’s death either. Percival smiles at him, warmly again, to soften the blow of recognition. “I’m sorry, my boy. It would have been my privilege to finally meet you in person, but I’m afraid it’s just not safe. If they’ve caught up to you in Sfax, it’s only a matter of time before they—”

Overlapping voices in the background draw his attention away for a moment, and when he forces it back there’s been a change. He smiles, but the lines around his eyes do not fold. “Ben,” that flat smile feels frozen on the screen, thick like the syrup of his voice, “Find Excalibur. You’re our only—”

An explosion rocks the transmission, and the screen goes dead.

* * *

“Avalon is gone,” Ben tells him later, draping a jacket across his shivering form. “They’re all gone.”

Luke leans into the warm familiarity of his uncle’s side. “Ben, what the hell is going on?”

Finally, Ben tells him.

* * *

“So.” The radio in the mess is tuned to a Chinese station, covering the explosion of the  _terrorist weapons facility_ , but Han hasn’t made any suggestion of their leaving any time soon - somewhere, between departing Libya and Avalon’s destruction, he seems to have chosen a side. “Excalibur. What’s it do? Where do we find it?”

“Her,” Ben corrects, voice soft. “And we’ll find her in Sai Kung, at the Hong Kong Academy.”

Han blinks twice, slowly. “Academy.” It’s not a question.

“Yes, she’s a student there.”

Chewie barks a laugh, and Han rubs a hand across his eyes; he looks tired now, they all do, but Han is the one who managed to hide it longest. “We’re sneaking into China,” he speaks slowly, as if waiting to be corrected, “to get, what, a third grader?”

Luke, barely listening, perks up a little at that - he loves his uncle, and when Han has the time to talk to him he doesn’t treat him like a kid (like  _too much_  of one, at least), but there’s a very clear line of us and them aboard the boat and he thinks maybe having someone else under the age of twenty around might be a little less… lonely. “She’s fifteen and already has connections on every continent, and more than a little bit of pull with the Global Senate.“

Chewie stops laughing. Han looks a mixture of awed and a little bit afraid. “Who the hell is this kid?”

“She’s the adopted daughter of the late Ambassador Organa,” Ben explains, a strange look in his eye; he’s facing away from Han, despite speaking to him, to gauge Luke’s reaction. “And Luke’s twin sister.”

* * *

Luke never, not even once, wondered what it would be like to have a sibling; he knew he did not have one, and that was that - there was no point to be found in wondering on something that simply would not be. So while he has no base to judge from, real or imagined, as to what having a sister (a  _twin_  sister) is supposed to be like, he thinks that Leia is, completely without bias, the best.

She’s over half a foot shorter than him in a way that no one he’s met has ever been, but makes up for it by being louder than he could ever hope to be - when she sees them, across a hallway when they come to retrieve her from school, she lets out something crossed between a scream and a squeal of “Uncle Ben!!” and throws herself into his arms (and once there she’s quiet for nearly ten minutes, sharing sadness and quiet whispers that are either about global rebellion, or just what’s happened with Avalon). When she finally pulls away, her eyes are red while her makeup is entirely unblemished, and she gives the others a polite smile.

Volume doesn’t return until Han makes the mistake of muttering something to Chewie, something in the Spanish that Luke doesn’t understand yet but must be really offensive, given the sudden flare of her temper. Her cheeks turn red and her eyes turn to embers and she lets loose a shrill stream of the same language until both the men are cowering away, offering raised arms and platitudes in a mix of tongues. “Adopted daughter of the Castilian Ambassador,” Ben reminds Luke with a wink and a nudge, and reaches over to drag Chewie and Han away.

Five feet of fury turn to the only party left - Luke - and all he can think to do is ask the question he’s been too nervous to ask Han. “Will you teach me?” She pauses, tripping over the sudden change, and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Teach you what?”

He recognizes the wrinkle in her nose when she smiles at him - his grandmother had those same lines. “I don’t speak Spanish,” he explains, “and sometimes I think it’s close enough to French that I might know what’s going on, but then sometimes I accidentally agree to scrape barnacles.”

Completely unfazed at the lack of context, she considers him, considers the question and the person asking it - and maybe a little bit of the way he thinks he can see his ears and his smile and his chin in hers. “I’ll teach you,” she offers magnanimously, like a queen, and then she’s a girl again and she loops an arm through his, pulling him into step beside her. “We’ll teach each other. Everything we missed out on, growing up apart.”

His grandmother has been dead for a month and half and her parents for barely twelve days, but Luke thinks that, together, they might survive anything.

* * *

Leia is just short enough that when she leans against Luke’s shoulder, he can easily press a swift kiss against her hairline.

Finally, he understands who all those extras from his grandmother were for.

* * *

They don’t go to Avalon, obviously.

They don’t go to Annwn either.

Luke and Leia spend their sixteenth birthday in the same remote area of Quebec they were born, in a small cabin in the forest; it took nearly an hour to trek out to it from the closest thing that passes for a town, but instead of isolated the structure feels safe. Happy, almost. Han drops bright, homemade paper hats onto each of their heads and smiles one of the charming smiles that gets him into and out of so much trouble. “Happy birthday, mijo,” he jostles a hug around Luke’s shoulders. “Princess.” He extends his hand solemnly; he and Leia have been at each other’s throats since that first meeting, with temporary truces like this one offered at special occasions.

She accepts it, sealing with a formal handshake. “Thank you, Alejandro,” and in the spirit of their newest attempt at agreement he doesn’t protest the use of his hated full name.

There’s a fire at the hearth and laughter in the air, and after dinner Ben presses identical flat parcels into their hands. “It’s slightly older tech,” he explains in his quiet voice as the twins crowd around a single tablet, “but I figured—”

The matching grin they flash him - too wide, too reckless - is a little bit their father’s, and entirely his own. “If we promise not to commit any felonies,” Luke beams at him, hair just this side of too long. He hasn’t cut it since Tunisia; Leia cut hers with one of Han’s knives the first day out of Chinese waters, and it hangs in choppy layers around her shoulders. “Do we have your permission to modify these?”

It had taken only twenty minutes, the length of time between arriving at the Academy to packing anything she could not leave without, for the twins to become an inseparable  _we_ ; for not the first time, Ben wonders if the choice to raise the twins apart was made not for their own safety, but for his. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he chastises through the budding headache, “and don’t get caught.”

* * *

It takes five weeks for the twins to modify the tablets, and seven hours for them to hack the Kingsman servers.

There’s not many of them left - servers or Kingsman - since the loss at Avalon; it’s an unknown tech who calls the security breach in, three in the morning and through the cell phone that Ben’s only used twice now. “Sir,” he sounds young and old at once. So many of them do now. “Unidentified access to external site B. They’ve managed to elude Merlin branch thus far, but the back trace places them somewhere on the South American continent.”

He presses a thumb and forefinger against the pressure points above his sinus, feeling the same mixture of youth and age - too young for it then, too old for it now. “Stand down,” he orders, and hauls himself from bed; the door to Leia’s room is shut, but there’s a suspicious noise when he knocks. “I said don’t get caught,” he speaks to the wood, which gives way at a second tap of knuckles.

“Their security was terrible,” Luke pipes up from the nest of blankets on the floor - Leia tiptoes around him to curl back up in the bed, on her stomach to lean down against her twin’s shoulder. “And we weren’t caught.”

The cell phone, screen bright with an active call, is waved as evidence.

Leia grins her father’s wild, wide grin. Luke shrugs, nonchalant. “Oh no, I tripped the alarm on the way out on purpose. Set it on the way in… I’ve spent the last month redoing the firewalls, beefing up the security, this was just me saying hello.”

“False alarm,” he says wearily into the phone; of course five weeks was too generous an estimate – Luke has the same skill with computers that his father had and exactly as much regard for authority, though he’s quieter about it. “It’s only Merlin.” The name falls from his lips without a moment of consideration. There hasn’t been a Merlin proper for at least three generations now, the duties split between the higher ranked of the branch itself, but Luke has both the skill and the dependability required. It feels  _right_  almost, Excaliber and Merlin.

The kingmakers.

* * *

The twins are four months shy of seventeen when one of Luke’s traces finds something.

There’s plenty to be found – the Emperor hasn’t been subtle in his intentions since his crowning in the first televised event after the Massacre, but there’s not enough of humanity left to fight back. The parts of the world outside his direct influence don’t have the resources, and the parts that do are too firmly built upon a foundation of bought blind devotion. – so it’s not exactly a surprise when Luke brings the schematics of a chemical weapons plant to his uncle. 

The surprise instead comes from the story it paints. The size alone is enough to be worrisome, large enough to manufacture and store a few thousand tons, and the hanger to the south could be nothing. Or, as he finds from the surveillance satellite he commandeers, it could be housing ten DC-10 tankers.

Leia does the math - 120,000 gallons total between the planes. Depending on what the plant is brewing it could affect as few as a hundred people and as many as a million. In the end, they suppose it doesn’t matter exactly what is being planned at the hardly secret facility; all that matters is that it’s there, and there is a plan.

It’s a story that’s been told too many times before, of death and destruction and of one man holding the key.

It starts, as all good stories do, at the beginning: Britain.

* * *

They lost too many of their own to the Massacre, and more than most of the remaining in the following years. At their current rate, the Kingsman are nearly no more.

Nearly, but not yet.

Han, an ex-smuggler of talents beyond what they’d learned about over the years, flies them into the country under a cover of darkness and at least six layers of false documents, landing them at an abandoned airstrip deep in the Scottish highlands. He delivers them safely into the waiting entourage of two Kingsman techs and one of the few remaining Knights, and then, when Kay nods grimly and tells him that his slate is now bare, he leaves.

Luke saw it coming, saw it in the way Han never quite trusted Ben and never settled into anything but odds with Leia. Saw it in the way the more they threw themselves into chasing digital rabbits down darker and more dangerous roads, the more he threw himself into patching the weather-beaten hull of the  _Falcon._ Saw it way back at the very start, when he told them that he couldn’t be bought or paid for or even borrowed. He’d stayed as he chose and he left much the same, and even knowing all that Luke couldn’t help but hate him a little bit.

Kay takes their findings and their speculations and the twins altogether too seriously, deferring to them both with muttered additions of their code names at every available opportunity, and it hardly seems to matter that the two of their ages combined is still a decade younger than him because he very quickly makes it clear that they are in charge. 

He takes everything they offer, with or without evidence to back it, and he promises that something will be done.

And then, finally acknowledging that they are still (legally, though perhaps never in actuality) children, he sets them up in one of their few remaining safe houses and asks them to wait.

The remaining Knights make their move on the chemical plant while Luke and Leia pace divots into the wood floors of the stripped-bare safe house, desperately wishing they were somehow more involved. “We should be on comm,” Luke feels the tension in the muscles of his legs, a tingle that feels like he’s just run a great distance - or is just about to. It’s less impatience and more the overwhelming feeling of wrongness, that something is  _wrong_ , that there are actual lives depending on the information he has gathered for them and unable to receive any information he uncovers in the meantime.

“We should be  _there_ ,” Leia snarls in return, the weapon as opposed to his wizard.

Ben has a few moments of flashback to the too many missions their parents exploded their way out of, and a few moments more to wonder how, despite never meeting them, they’ve managed to grow into every single one of their parents worst qualities, and quite a few of their best. (And even more, he thinks, of his own.) “You should both be very proud,” he says instead, because some wounds only become more painful with time. “As I am.”

He checks his watch then, because the team has sworn that they will be out by 0500 and will check in with the results, and—

—a loud noise like a crack, and Ben has just enough time to ponder the flower of crimson that blooms out from his chest like a question before his legs give out beneath him.

It’s Luke who reacts to the shot, pulling Leia down with him to a pained heap on the floor; he hisses for her to be quiet before moving his limbs off hers, moving in a practiced crawl and tugging her hand back toward the kitchen, and for once in their time together she listens. It’s not until the cabinet door closes easily behind them that he thanks whatever detriment in their breeding or raising that kept them from growing any taller than they have.

“Ben,” she whispers, and Luke squeezes her hand sharply. In the dark, she taps the word into his palm with morse code.

It’s a strain, trying to see through the hole left behind when the screws of the handle were removed – Luke sees a golden halo of shredded wood and a few dark shapes that might be their uncle’s feet, or possibly the couch.  _No one is moving_ , Luke taps back. He had no plans for their survival beyond getting away from the windows or the walls or wherever the shot came from, and the jagged echo of their breathing in the small space sounds too loud for any safety.

_Esmahni_ , comes the too-slow, too-weak tap against the floor boards.  _I’m sorry_.

It’s luck alone that the door is kicked open then, as it masks the sound of Luke’s sharp, sorrow-filled gasp for air.

The man that enters is tall, taller even than Ben, and dressed head to toe in shadows – hard to tell for certain, but his outline is thicker and starker than they’re used to. Not a suit, and perhaps a military uniform. The sound of heavy, booted footsteps echo on the wood of the floors, and movement at the highest point turns to a helmet being removed, tossed to the floor. “No,” the voice is guttural and inhuman, buzzing with a voice masking device, but the pain it contains is genuine. “No,  _no_.”

A wet cough comes from out of sight. “Mordred,” Ben greets with too much softness, tenderness bleeding through his words like the wound had through his suit.

“ _Arthur_ ,” The Black Knight croaks, and drops his head down to rest his forehead against the red that puddles against the ruined silk of Ben’s shirt. Deep, dry sobs heave in the silence, and Luke digs his fingernails into the soft skin of Leia’s palm – she pinches him back, silent. It’s neither of them. The large, shadowy figure of the Black Knight is suddenly nothing more than a man. “Ben,” his gravelly voice comes again, with the proper name this time, and his hands flow where his words fail, touching Ben’s face and the wound in his chest and the grey in his hair. “Ben—”

“I know,” comes the too-slow, too-weak reply. It sounds as though it’s taking every last ounce of Ben’s strength to form the words, whispers hovering at his lips too soft to make it to the air.

He takes one ragged, final breath, and then nothing.

The Black Knight stands, destroys the couch in a blind fury, and rips the door off its hinges in his exit.

* * *

Neither of the twins move until hours later, when the splintered door is knocked down and Han nearly turns the apartment upside down looking for them, and by then there’s not enough left between them to do more than fall through the cabinet door and into his grasp.


End file.
